The Many Layered Skirt

Trailer to The Many Layered Skirt

This is Man Sheung's story. She sews a beautiful Kwan Family patchwork quilt, developing the colours and patterns, as she seamlessly integrates four generations of her most impressively influential family into the telling of her own incredible journey.

As a young girl in the 1930s, she is shifted among different households in Kuala Lumpur, Kowloon Tong and Shanghai, in an attempt to get her a good education and to keep her from harms way, as the Japanese were constantly threatening. Loneliness and homesickness are her everyday companions. She would go years without seeing her father, and missing him would become an enduring emptiness, which, in time, became "a forever."

It is during this period that she introduces her Great Grandmother--a Chinese, French, English speaking woman years ahead of her time, who in a male dominated society, is a court interpreter during the land disputes between nations, that wanted a piece of China, and the Empress Dowager.

In spite of all the efforts to protect her, Man Sheung is caught in Kowloon Tong during the Japanese invasion and occupation. She is a young teenager who should have been at school; instead, she has to manoeuvre the horrible stench and sights of the streets--dead or dying bodies, some quartered with pieces missing--food for the starving, trying to get the meagre rice ration, needed to keep her family alive. 

You meet her Grandfather who was a classmate and friend of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, and you learn how he helped Sun in the early years of the First Republic and of the social changes that they instituted. You hear about a Granduncle who was the personal physician to the Empress Dowager and how dishes given to him by the Empress become a family treasure.

When the opportunity arose, Man Sheung's mother, not knowing whether she was throwing her from the fry pan into the fire, sends her alone, with a missionary group, on a refugee boat, to Mainland China. They promise to leave her at a suitable Christian school. They trek across the Western Provinces, finally coming to the "Temple School" that found safe haven high above the midstream of the Yangtze River, in a Ming Dynasty built hermitage. For fear that her heart won't withstand the break when it comes time to leave, she is determined not to befriend the old-fashioned, drab, Mandarin speaking students. To escape the cacophony of foreign sounds, she takes her loneliness and homesickness into the hills behind the temple. Instead of peace, what she finds causes paralyzing fear to join her other companions. This experience is instrumental in forming the school's War Effort.

In time, the Japanese are but a few miles away, and the school must be evacuated. Not knowing exactly where it might be, but knowing that it is the war time Capital, Man Sheung, all alone, decides to get to Chungking. She hides from Japanese "Mosquitoes" and their machine guns, and sees villages swiped out by their "burning eggs." The screaming haunts her.

In Chungking you meet her Uncle S.S., a well known architect who affiliates with Chiang Kai- shek and her Uncle S.Y., a classmate of Chou En-lai--the two are staunch supporters of Mao Tse-tung. She is in Chungking when the Sino-Japanese war ends, and it is here,  that she is given her brother Kit's air force uniform  and personal belongings, among which, is an unfinished letter to his mother. Completely exhausted emotionally, and; even though, China is now at Civil War--Communists against Nationalists, family member against family member, she decides that she must go home. She survives a trip, in a wooden boat (just an oversized san pan) down the Yangtze and through Hell's Gate. Upon reaching Shanghai, she stops, and earns her High School Diploma--finally. Then she goes home to her mother. When she gives her mother Kit's belongings, she cradles them to her heart, and they share the precious unbearable sadness in silence.

Man Sheung has sewed into her Kwan Family patchwork quilt a myriad of universal human emotions, and the quilt honours the unbelievable resilience of the human spirit.